Search Results for: thoughts on liberty

Some Thoughts On Liberty

April 11, 2011 – 3:17 pm

I yammer on a lot about liberty in these pages, and sound the alarm when I think it is threatened. For all of that, though, I’m not an extreme libertarian; limitations on liberty are necessary for a well-functioning society. I just don’t like to see it limited beyond necessity, and I don’t like policies whose […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (12)

What We’ve Lost

July 30, 2020 – 12:49 am

I had a post ready to go here yesterday, but I sent it off to American Greatness and they picked it up, so I’ll ask you to read it there. Note: a disclaimer about the reality of the pandemic didn’t make the final cut. I’ll I’ll post the unedited, and possibly slightly revised, version here […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics, Society and Culture | Comments (8)

E Pluribus Pluribus

May 14, 2018 – 11:31 am

I’m driving all day, but for now here’s a brief item on the political consequences of shifting American demographics. Rising diversity at national scale increases tribalism, destroys cohesion, diminishes liberty, and fosters divisive competition that throughout history always tends toward fission and violence. What fools we are.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Politics | Comments (1)

The Narrowing Effect Of Diversity

August 8, 2017 – 1:30 pm

I’ve just read an article at Crisis magazine called The Day the Music Died. (Hat-tip to Bill V.) From the article: When pursued to its logical conclusion, multiculturalism leads to monoculturalism, and eventually to a monochrome society. That’s because without a common culture to unite them, multicultures break down into competing subcultures. When this happens, […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (2)

Good Diversity, Bad Diversity

June 24, 2016 – 12:46 pm

Much is being made of the Brexit vote as symptomatic of a rising tide of nationalism. So it is, and so much the better. Anyone who appreciates diversity — the glorious variety of human cultures, customs, and folkways — should applaud, not condemn, the natural human yearning of every people to have a homeland in […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (25)

Tractatus Logico-Multiculturalus

May 12, 2016 – 1:48 pm

(1) One of the most important ways that cultures differ is in their normative biases. (2) When composing a multicultural Venn diagram, the intersection can only contain non-contradictory elements of the cultures being combined. (3) Norms are often contradictory in a way that, say, food is not. (Food, and music, the most commonly cited blessings […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Reaction | Comments (6)

Reactionary Roundup

October 16, 2015 – 12:14 pm

“Neoreactionaries” are a wordy bunch, and it’s hard to keep up with the volume of blogorrhea they produce every week. If you’re interested, Nick B. Steves, who appears these days to be NRx’s General Secretary, posts his own gleanings from the “reactosphere” in a weekly, somewhat Catholic-leaning summary, here, and he’s also put together a […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Reason and Philosophy, Immigration, Reaction, Society and Culture | Comments (15)

Simple Common Sense About Diversity And Immigration

May 26, 2013 – 10:46 pm

I think it’s time for a brief review of some simple, obvious facts about human nature and the character of human societies. 1) People generally prefer to live with others like themselves. Even in highly diverse places like great port cities, people generally associate homogeneously in their private lives. 2) In highly homogeneous societies, those […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Pretty Good Posts | Comments (32)

A Progressive Disease

April 28, 2013 – 11:56 pm

The Boston bombings have set off a new round of security-tightening everywhere you look. When I went to the train station in Providence last week, I saw that passengers now have to present ID to well-armed police officers just to get to the platform; some had their bags searched. Sporting arenas are adding item after […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Jihad | Comments (21)

Hell On Earth

December 15, 2012 – 5:56 pm

In the wake of the Newtown shootings, the usual voices on the Left have resumed their call for the nation to “do something” about guns. In a longish post, here are some contrarian opinions from around the blogosphere, and a few observations of my own.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (72)

Lumos!

December 17, 2011 – 5:56 pm

The Senate has passed their stopgap spending bill, which included a rider that annuls, temporarily at least, what would effectively have been a ban on incandescent bulbs beginning this year. The intrusive legislation had made an awful lot of people hopping mad — but looking on the bright side (especially now that it has been […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (5)

Free To Obey

November 3, 2011 – 11:17 am

A while back I wrote a post examining why a society’s need to maintain public harmony in the face of increasing diversity necessarily comes at the expense of meaningful liberties. George Will takes up the same topic in his latest column, Conformity for diversity’s sake. We read: Illustrating an intellectual confusion common on campuses, Vanderbilt […]

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (11)

Logic and Faith

July 30, 2005 – 8:39 pm

Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, comments here on Sam Harris’s book The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. I haven’t read the book, so I must be careful about what I say here, but from the excerpts quoted, and the interview given by Harris at Amazon, he (Harris) appears to be staking out a position that, with unintended irony, is the product of his own faith. The most telling example of this is something he said in this interview:

‘Faith’ is a false belief in unjustified convictions.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (2)